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An asynchronous processing solution for MS Dynamics NAV

From the earliest to the newest NAV versions, long-running tasks are usually accompanied by a progress bar or windows with multiple progress bars. It’s developer’s preferred choice to inform the user with the progress of the launched task – an obvious choice to an hourglass cursor. There are plenty of business processes in any NAV database that do heavy processing. If we look into a posting task, NAV generates Add-On specific ledger entries, standard specific ledger entries, creates invoices and lines, adjacent records and so on. Therefore these tasks can take a while and can keep the user session busy.

This blog is about a solution, my boss and I designed and used it on a few target processes, to allow users to immediately regain control of their session after the launch of a long-running task, while assigning the processing to a NAV background session. The results of the processing are recorded and easily retrievable by the calling page automatically by using PingPong Control AddIn.

How does our solution get implemented?

A table with entities to be processed named in the code sample “Generic Entity”. At the minimum the table should have PK fields. Our sample has three fields that are part of the PK: Field_1, Field_2, Field_3.

A card page for “Generic Entity” table named “Generic Entity Card” whose only action will launch the async process.

A factbox “Queue Summary Factbox” used on the “Generic Entity Card” to reflect the status of the last queued record processed. The status gets updated by using a PingPong Control AddIn.

A new table “Processing Queue”. At the minimum add enough fields to be able to locate later the record(“Generic Entity”) that launched the process. Additionally, an Option field, “Status” with at least 4 values: Queued, Processing, Error and Success and a Text field “Error Message” to record the errors that prevented the process to finish successfully.

A new codeunit “Process Queue” (whose Rec is “Posting Queue” ). In the Run function of this codeunit wrap the processing in a TryFunction to be able to rollback if errors are encountered.

If wanted you can add more fields to the “Processing Queue”. In our environment we have “Document No.” of the resulting Posted Sales Invoice and “Elapsed Time” to record the duration of the task. You could also enable Lookup on the factbox field to open a list page for Processing Queue table.